"Speak to the winds and say, 'This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Come, O breath, from the four winds! Breathe into these dead bodies so that they may live again.'"
--Ezekiel 37:9

Friday, April 24, 2015

Sermon for April 19, 2015

The Roar of the Faithful Tide

We
declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have
seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands,
concerning the word of life— this life was revealed, and we have seen it and
testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and
was revealed to us— we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you
also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father
and with his Son Jesus Christ. We are writing these things so that our joy may
be complete. This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you,
that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we
have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do
what is true; but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we
have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us
from all sin.1 John 1:1-7

Dorothy Sölle
was a theologian and writer. As A German who watched the atrocities of
Auschwitz, Sölle wrote passionately that humans are to struggle together
against oppression, sexism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of authoritarianism.
For Sölle, the idea of a God who sat in “heaven in all its glory” while
Auschwitz was organized was unbearable. Sölle she developed a powerful
“post-Auschwitz theology,” an understanding of God who does not float above
history and its trauma but who shares intimately in the suffering of the
victims.

In an article
in The Christian Century, published
in 1982, Sölle thought about sin and suffering. She wrote a caricature of a
woman named Marianne, which I want to share with you today.

Marianne is an attractive young woman who owns her
own home in the suburb where she lives with her two children. She talks about
the gold jewelry her husband gave her for Christmas. The gold comes from South
Africa; but she doesn’t see the blood on her gold chain. She hardly understands
the connection between racism, infant death rates and exploitation, on the one
hand, and profit and the low price of gold, on the other hand. Another thing
she doesn’t (yet) know is that gold can’t keep her warm.

For her, “sin” is a ridiculously old-fashioned word,
connected with eating too many calories, illegal parking or uncondoned sexual
behavior. You really can’t take any of that seriously. Marianne feels guilty
about her mother because she doesn’t visit her often enough; occasionally she
asks herself if she takes proper care of her children. But sin?

Like so many people, Marianne is superficially
Christianized. In her youth she was taught that sin means separation from God,
turning away from the Creator, revolt against God, worship of other gods. But
all of these are empty phrases which have nothing to do with her life. She
experiences the actual meaning of this word sin -- namely, being separated from
God -- most closely when she is depressed.

Recently she’s been depressed a lot without being
able to say why. Soon, the emptiness of her life will catch up with, her. Then
she will either have to change her life, or she will go right on living in her
modernized doll house and denying, repressing, sweeping under a thicker and thicker
rug everything that disturbs or challenges her. She will remain underdeveloped
rationally, emotionally, socially and therefore individually as well. A
colonized being, governed by trends in which she has no say but to which she
submits, cut off from life.

Thanks to her feminine upbringing, Marianne feels
like a victim of her environment. She doesn’t know her own strengths and
capabilities. She’s been brainwashed long enough to believe that she can’t
patch an electric wire; that only young, attractive women have anything to say
on television; that she doesn’t understand anything about business and
politics.

Marianne’s relationship to her neighbor is very
reduced. She has to do only with people of her own class. She keeps her
children away from contact with different people, different experiences,
different cultures (unconsciously, of course). Unrecognized racism has become
an integral part of her life. But even her relationship to people of her own
class is essentially based on competition and envy.

Marianne’s relationship to the creation and to
nature is perhaps somewhat less disturbed. She rides a bicycle, but she’s lost
her original joy in the returning birds, the rise of the moon. Everything she
loved as a very young girl is further away now, more indifferent.

Marianne’s relationship to the human family, to her
sisters in the Third World, is troubled. I’ve given up even trying to answer
her occasional “But what can anybody really do?” This question just masks the
fact that she really doesn’t want to do anything.

I wonder if
there is some resonance – some truth in this caricature? I wonder if there is a
little bit of Marianne in each of us; people who have been trained to live a water-logged
existence. How many of us would like to experience the abundance of love while
denying the death-dealing power of sin. I ask that question because I don’t
think we can have one without the other. We can’t understand love without also
experiencing separation. We don’t understand light without shadows. Artists
call it negative space: the area that surrounds an image. Negative space helps
to define the boundaries of the main image and brings balance to a composition.
In the same way, can we understand fulfillment without yearning? Peace without
violence? How can we know forgiveness without sin?

Like
Marianne, we may think of sin as a ridiculously old-fashioned word. Some of us
were taught that sin is any willful act against God’s rules for us – an open
revolt against God. Or, there are sins of omission – failing to do the things
God wants us to, like all those rules about loving our enemies. In this
worldview, God becomes the moral lawgiver who establishes the boundaries of proper
human conduct.Since we are always
overstepping the boundaries, God has to judge our sin. We become candidates for
some of God’s renowned and notorious wrath. When I was growing up, I was taught
that sin was an individual problem that could be solved with some good old
fashioned prayer and repentance, or some blood atonement from an innocent
victim that sacralizes victimization. As today’s scripture says, “the
blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.”

At this point
in my life, I have some problems with this definition. First and foremost, the
idea of individualized sin as rebellion against God tends to keep marginalized
people down.It’s so easy to say, “That
person must be poor, or sick, or jobless, or suffering because of some rebellion
against God. That person must be afflicted because God is punishing some sin.” If
my life is going well, then I must not be sinning enough to get God’s
attention. I can claim that if my life is good, then God must be on my side. So
now there are sinners and saints. Them and us. Outsiders and insiders. Locking
our doors, building our fences, clutching our purses, we begin to hide from the
possibility of relationship with “those people.” Now I can marginalize those
who are suffering while praising my own inherent goodness. Now I can look at
people who are different than me with fear. Now I can judge others. Now I can protect
ourselves from “them.” Now I talk about “those people” but fail to think about
how we function in the system. Now I can use religion as a justification to
hurt others. Now I can use violence as an instrument of God’s wrath. It’s a
tactic as old as time: use religion to blame and hurt the victim. As we
remember Holocaust Remembrance Day, we realize that what I’m describing is a
world view that takes us only a few steps away from the gas chambers of
Auschwitz. As the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide
approaches, we recognize that religion-invoked murder begins with theology that
flourishes by creating outsides and sinners who are worthy of God’s wrath.

I think
Western Christianity got this one wrong. I think we did the exact thing that 1
John warns us against: we say
we have fellowship with God while walking in darkness. What if the
people I thought were saints are really part of the sin? What if calling other
people out on their sin is a way to distract others from the big problems of
organized, systemic immorality? For example, I can mistakenly think that the
level of personal happiness in my life has to with how pleasing I am to God. In
reality, my happiness can be attributed to the fact that our culture affords me
privileges as a white, middle-class, heterosexual male.If I unconsciously benefit from white
supremacy, then who is really involved in sin? Is it those who are devalued
because religion says they suffer due to personal rebellion against God? Or is
it me? Am I caught up in sin because I can benefit from unjust social
structures that reward me for the arbitrary color of my skin, or my gender
identity, or my sexual orientation? If there is sin, then where does it lie?

Yes, we were
taught that sin is the destruction of our relationship with God. But let’s
think this through some more. When the tradition says that sin destroys of our
relationship to God, it doesn’t mean individual “sins” but rather the
destruction of our human capacity for relatedness. Let’s get back to Dorothy
Sölle’s image of Marianne. Sin means that life around us seems to us to become
shadowy and unimportant; it loses its taste. We can take it or leave it. Sin
means being separated from the ground of life; it means having a disturbed
relationship to ourselves, our neighbor, the creation and the human family. Sin
means not knowing one’s own strengths and capabilities; never experiencing
solidarity; giving oneself credit for nothing; having no self-confidence. It
means living without self-determination, without power, without hope – it’s
what Black theologians define as the apathy of those who have given up.

I think we
need a different kind of discourse. Instead of heaping judgment on the sinner,
we attune ourselves to the voices of those who have been sinned against. So, using
my example of white male privilege, I can lament my own complicity in racial
injustice and the ways white supremacy continues to leave racial relations
undone in the United States. I can listen to the pain and anguish of my sisters
and brothers who are hurting and suffering, and then do something about it. I
can relinquish my economic and racial advantages, beginning with ways that
whiteness has been used to name God and define the human condition.

The same can
be said about hetero-patriarchy (that’s fancy talk for being a straight male).
What might it mean to hear those who have been sinned against and relinquish
heterosexual male advantage? What an uncomfortable conversation we must have
about this! And yet, we cannot talk about sin in ways that render us
comfortable in the face of rampant injustice. If our sin-talk can lead us to
healing, it must disrupt the idolatry of the individual and the veneration of
the narcissist

What we need
is a different method -- a different relationship with the world that has borrowed the eyes
of God. A different set of ears that hears God summoning
us, like the lulling, rhythmic roar of the faithful tide, eternally wearing
away immovable pillars of stone on the shoreline:

Solid stones
of separation,

Towering
rocks of recklessness,

Conceited
cliffs of chaos,

Prideful
pillars of prejudice,

Ceaseless
shores of injustice,

Venerated
veins of violence,

All of those
sins, those obstacles that seem like they will never change, those boundaries
that separate us from one another – they are not as fixed as we think. The roar
of love’s faithful tide wears them all away.

You are I are
living in a condition that God wants us to change. Love erodes our defenses and
opens us to fullness. Love ashes over all the obstructions and helps us give
way to God. All will be gathered in God. All will be made whole. And each
moment, each wave, each demanding and insistent tide of love crashing upon us,
helps us live as forgiving and forgiven people.

Sources:

http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1314

The Fall to Violence: Original
Sin in Relational Theology,
by Marjorie Suchocki

Beyond Apathy: A Theology for
Bystanders, by
Elisabeth T. Vasko

Reclaiming the Faith; Sermons by
a Liberal Christian Wil Bailey by Carlos David.